Impact of assigning resources at the Work Package (Summary Task) l

[Desmond]

I have taken over a schedule on which resources have so far been assigned at
the lowest task level. In order to be able to accurately tie Actual Hours to
the work done in the schedule without requiring team members to enter hours
for each and every task, I propose to assign resources at the Work Package
level from now on. The question I have is whether having resources assigned
at the lowest task level for tasks up to the end of January and having them
assigned at the WP (Summary) level from now on will present problems for MS
Project in rolling totals up to the higher (Control Account) and project
summary levels.

 

[Jim Aksel]

Project will accept this, but it is certainly not a best practice to assign
resources to summary tasks. You are going to have to load your resources
manually using the task usage or similar view at the summary level. If you
let Project do it, it will level load them into the remaining duration and
that may not match your task breakdown.

Generally, the best your accounting system is going to do is tie actual
costs to a work packages (taken from a time sheet). Another approach to use
would be to create some dummy tasks with no resources. These would be
"Actual Cost WP#1" (etc.). Key in your actuals there. Set MSP to not
calculate costs automatically. Claim your EV at the task level (where it is
resource loaded) and collect costs at the WP level through the dummy tasks.
Take the actuals data from your accoutnting system.
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Jim Aksel, MVP

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http://www.msprojectblog.com